Getting Sober Killed My Love Life

The final straw in my 10-year drinking career was the homely guy from the Internet. His OkCupid pictures hadn't looked especially unattractive—they were, you know, fine — but I met up with him anyway because I was lonely in a brand new city. I also had poor standards, especially when I drank.

We met up at a dive bar, sat on a crusty outdoor picnic bench and got drunk while discussing Writing and Movies and Life.

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Mark was smart, but I felt not even the tiniest twinge of attraction toward him. Still, he was a decent conversationalist, and he was a dude to pay for my drinks.

I don't remember leaving the bar, or how he ended up coming home with me. All I remember is waking up the next morning, in nearly no clothing, with a man I found physically repugnant, and bruises all over my thighs.

When I asked about the bruises, he said we'd hooked up. I'd seemed into it, he said, "Nothing crazy went down." I felt sick, and not just from my excruciating hangover. After that night, Mark tried to call me three times, but I didn't pick up. I again fought the urge to vomit when I passed him on the street six months later.

Over the years — way before Mark — three different therapists had suggested I try putting the bottle down, but it took that stomach-churning hookup for me to really listen. Joanie, my therapist at the time, drove it home even further when she told me, "Generally speaking, people who don't have drinking problems don't experience blackouts."

I was 29 when I decided to stop drinking. But I never expected that doing something so positive for my long-term sanity would be such a powerful hit on my love life. I've been sober now for the better part of eight years, and during that time, I haven't dated anyone for longer than three months, despite being smart, reasonably attractive, and gainfully employed (I'm a homeowner, for God's sake!).

I didn't think about the realities of sober dating much beforehand. I figured it might be tricky passing up the wine list on a dinner date, but I never considered the nerve-wracking nature of trying to explain why I didn't drink or, worse, the torturous awkwardness of getting naked with a new guy while stone-cold sober.

It was glaringly apparent that alcohol and I never made an attractive pair. I'd been a near-daily, frequent-blackout drinker since stomping off to college at 18. Alcohol served as an escape from my messed-up brain. I'd been diagnosed with depression at 16 and started meds at 17. Although the antidepressants helped, they didn't help enough. I still spent 90 percent of every day dogged by an ongoing inner narration of all the ways I wasn't good enough.

Alcohol also made the dude thing so much easier. I'd always been super-shy, and the guys at my high school barely looked at me. I felt monumentally insecure about my relative lack of experience. Plus, as a late-blooming American girl growing up in the '80s, I'd absorbed all those insidious cultural messages from movies and TV and magazines and distant great-aunts: A woman's nothing without a man to love her, I learned, and sex is the quickest route to earning said love.

Throughout college and beyond, I confused sex with validation. Every hookup felt like another brag I could add to my collection of conquests. It felt like my attractiveness level (which, messed up as it is, can make up a big piece of a woman's self-worth) magically shot up by each new man who wanted to sleep with me.

Drinking helped blur my senses enough to let me do things (and people) I'd never consider when sober. Sometimes I had enough wits about me to recognize that I was only hooking up with someone because I was bored or lonely. But usually I was just too wasted to care about the reasons. All that mattered was feeling, for even a few minutes, like I was the beautiful, desired center of someone's world.

First dates led into bed, which spiraled into months-long relationships with men I felt nothing for. That stout, earnest 26-year-old virgin with the black eyes and floppy hair? I flinched when he touched me, but at least I wasn't sleeping alone.

When I finally stopped drinking, it was hard, especially in the beginning, but it got easier with time. I started going to recovery meetings and swapped candy and coffee for red wine and vodka tonics. Ensconced in a new social bubble with likeminded strangers who were learning together to take care of ourselves, I rosily imagined staying single for six months, max, before being karmically rewarded for my epic sober bravery.

But ... no. Dry dating was about 6 gazillion times more difficult than I'd envisioned. I tried dating guys in recovery, but nothing panned out. They seemed fickle and immature, more interested in casual fooling around than in dating. Plus, I was way more picky about who I'd go out with, and I had no clue how or when to tell "normal" guys I didn't drink. What's a breezy way of saying "I'm a teetotaler" without giving the impression that you're either a disturbed ex-mess or a party pooper?

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On my first date with a writer named Tom, after I'd attempted to casually mention that I didn't drink, he leaned in over my plate of Pad Thai and boomed, "Are you an alcoholic?" Horrified, I stammered something like "Maybe! Kind of! Ha-ha!" and gulped my tea.

I didn't always wait until I was out with someone to tell him I didn't drink. For a while I tried putting it on my OkCupid profile, but that meant I'd get fewer messages. Most of the time I waited until a guy would ask me out—usually for drinks — and then try to confess right then: "I don't drink, but I'll have a Shirley Temple."

I'll never forget the shame that fell over me in early sobriety when Grant, a guy I dated for two months—someone I'd met through a friend and like-liked for years—sighed with disappointment that we'd "never be able to have a glass of wine together." He'd seemed on board with my not drinking, which made it all the more surprising and painful. I tried to explain why that'd be a terrible idea: Sometimes when I drank I became overly emotional, dramatic, and hypersensitive, and I'd ruined more than one relationship that way. But his lack of sensitivity made me doubt not just our compatibility, but my own romantic prospects with any guy who liked to drink socially, too.

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And then there were the guys who didn't just drink socially—the ones who seemed oblivious to their own excesses. After a sweet dinner with a shaggy-haired hipster named Cal, the date started deteriorating when we walked around the corner to watch a band play. Cal knew I didn't drink, but he ordered a beer and a shot the second we sat down. He then proceeded to tell me about his "stoned yoga" practice before launching into an explanation of why he loved doing coke "from time to time." ("Well, actually," he admitted, "I might have had a little last night.") When he began to wax poetic about his greatest love—mushrooms—I began plotting my escape.

Despite Internet-dating up a storm, I didn't meet many guys who had everything I was looking for: smarts, kindness, integrity, humor, a desire for a real relationship, as well as respect for my decision not to imbibe. Unfortunately, the few who matched this criteria didn't work out. I was lonely, and sometimes I succumbed to self-pity, feeling 100 percent positive that I was destined to die alone in my apartment with my cats. Yes, I know that's a cliché, but I was convinced I'd be a reason for its existence. And, truthfully, it stung watching most of my friends get married and start having babies while I endlessly did the dating dance. Still, my gut maintained that I was doing the right thing — both in giving up drinking and in refusing to settle for a guy I was only lukewarm about.

Sobriety had helped me understand myself better than ever before. After years of intense work both in recovery groups and with therapists, I learned that happiness really is an inside job. Constantly turning to external avenues for approval, recognition, and a reason to live is, well, no way to live. I also finally got it that sex and validation aren't the same thing and that basing my self-worth on how many guys wanted to sleep with me would only keep me empty and spinning.

I've vowed that I'll never again put myself — or anyone else — through the humiliation of being in a relationship based more on easing loneliness than on love. And in the last year I've finally started to get into a dating groove that feels comfortable. I've been meeting better men these days, partially because I'm more receptive to guys I might have dismissed in the past, and partially because I don't feel the fevered rush to pin someone down, like, yesterday. I'm trying to look at having a partner as a nice-to-have, not a must-have.

Have I found the right guy yet? No, I haven't. But I'm feeling much more optimistic that I one day will. I've gone out guys with pretty eyes, sweet smiles and, most important, not even the faintest whiff of concern when I order Diet Coke instead of cabernet.